Nuvei has completed a live in-agent payment proof of concept with Visa, Arvato Systems, and Kings and Priests.
In the transaction, a merchant's AI agent initiated a product purchase on behalf of a shopper and completed payment within the agent itself, without redirecting to a separate checkout flow. The purchase was authorised across multiple issuers in Europe and settled on Visa's network using a tokenised Visa credential within Visa Intelligent Commerce, governed by shopper-set guardrails such as spending caps and approved purchase categories.
From discovery to in-agent execution
The proof of concept extends agentic commerce beyond product discovery by keeping authorisation and payment inside the first-party agent experience. It also serves as an early demonstration of Nuvei Agentic, a protocol-agnostic execution layer intended to let any AI agent initiate a payment regardless of the underlying standard it uses.
Issuing partners involved in the pilot included Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank, Bank Leumi, CAL, MAX, and Bank of Cyprus. In addition, Nuvei, Visa, and the participating issuers are now working towards moving the capability into production.
Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product & Solutions, Visa Europe, said the initiative extends existing capabilities, including tokenisation and network-level controls, to support agent-initiated payments in a consistent and trusted manner, adding that authentication approaches are expected to evolve as adoption grows. Carsten Bruning, Vice President Digital Commerce at Arvato Systems, said the pilot validated interoperability across the payment flow and confirmed that a transaction can be completed inside the agent rather than on a merchant's website.
Merchant priorities shape the roadmap
According to Nuvei, merchants attending its Global Customer Advisory Board this week identified first-party agentic capabilities as their immediate priority, with support for public, third-party agents expected to follow as market demand develops.
Nuvei is building two components to support this direction. A Protocol Compatibility Layer would allow merchants to integrate once and accept payments initiated through agent standards including ACP, AP2, or MCP, routed across payment networks. At the same time, Nuvei intends to certify this layer against both Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. A separate Know Your Agent function is designed to register and credential agents, validate a consumer's mandate, score agent reputation, and maintain an audit trail of actions taken.
Citing McKinsey estimates, Nuvei noted that agentic commerce is projected to generate USD 1 trillion in global transaction volume by 2030, rising to between USD 3 trillion and USD 5 trillion by 2035. Nuvei is targeting initial availability of its agentic infrastructure, covering protocol compatibility, the Know Your Agent registry and risk scoring, network certifications, and a developer sandbox, in the second half of 2026. The company said this will run on its existing Level 1 PCI-certified infrastructure and risk and fraud tooling already used across its merchant base.
